


Pack

by DeliriousRose



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Post-War, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 21:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18819148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeliriousRose/pseuds/DeliriousRose
Summary: One winter day, some months after the Battle of Dawn and the Fall of King's Landing, Bran announces to Sansa that Arya is coming home and that she's not coming alone.





	Pack

Maester Wolkan pushes Bran through the courtyard, the snowflakes dusting their furs. Sansa sighs, uncertain if walk up to them or stay on the threshold, between the winter freezing wind and the warmth of the castle. _You shouldn’t stay outside with this weather_ , she’s about to say, but the person who was once her brother gives her an unsettling glance, the kind that still puts her uneasy.

‘Arya is coming,’ Bran says, his voice monotone.

Sansa stiffens despite the relief. They had not seen Arya since the day after they were told the truth about Jon—no, not Jon, Aegon. His name is Aegon—almost nine months before. They had not heard about her since the Fall of King’s Landing, seven months before—Sansa had even tried to get Bran to use his Three-eyed Raven ability, just to check if their sister was fine, but it was like he never heard. And now—

‘When should we expect her?’ she asks.

‘She is not alone.’

Sansa frowns. Who could be with her? ‘Then I’ll have her room and one of the guestrooms ready. But when should we—’

‘Mother’s room is the warmest in Winterfell,’ Bran says, raising his blank eyes on her. ‘We’ll let her use it as long as necessary.’

Sansa frowns. Why should she swap rooms with Arya? And what did Bran mean with “as long as necessary”? Does Arya not plan to remain in Winterfell, her home? Perhaps… perhaps she has gotten employment at court—she could see her sister becoming the new Master of Whispers. Perhaps she’s coming to… to what? Get whatever she has left behind the first time? Give Father, Robb and Rickon a proper goodbye? And why that? Winterfell is her home, too. Their doors will be always open for her.

Sansa sighs again and retreats into the castle’s warmth. She should focus on the task at hand, have everything ready for her sister’s return. Really, no need to linger on those questions, she’d get her answers soon. Except for the one about the _when_ : if Sansa knows when Arya will arrive, she could ask the cook to prepare some of her sister’s favourite dishes.

 

* * *

 

There was nothing in the day that set it apart from the others.

Winterfell woke on a grey morning, with the only event of a dust of snow; the courtyards turning into a buzzing hub during the short hours of light. Evening came too early, as always in winter, and soon the inhabitants of the castle clustered around the many fireplaces, the children listening with awe at the tales of the elders—tales of knights and long-dead Starks. The kind of tales that Sansa used to listen from Old Nan’s mouth, while she sat by the fireplace sewing clothes for the poorer children with her mother and her septa, a life before.

Someone clears his throat behind her and Sansa turns her eyes on the servant. ‘Yes?’

The woman bows her head, her hands fidgeting with her apron. ‘Lady Arya is here, milady.’

Not another word. Sansa stands up and hurries to the courtyard. At first, she sees no one, until a dancing shadow by the stables catches her eyes. Without wasting more time, Sansa sprints to the door, almost stumbling into a stable boy—relief overwhelming her as soon as she recognises in the weatherworn figure unloading a satchel from a roan her sister. It feels almost like the first time, about two years before, when they had met in front of their father’s tomb. But this time, Sansa says nothing and just rushes to take Arya into her arms to—

‘I need to see Maester Wolkan first,’ Arya whispers, taking a step back and refusing to look into her face.

The gesture hurts Sansa more than she would ever admit. But after a second glance, she notices how pale Arya is, her features both gaunt and swollen.

‘Are you’—wounded?— ‘ _sick_?’

She must be, and perhaps that’s why she returned. That’s why she refused to hug her, not to pass her whatever ailment she has. It would make sense, then, if Bran insisted to let her stay in Mother’s rooms, the warmest in the keep.

Arya fidgets, her movements not as agile as Sansa remembered. She doesn’t speak.

‘Sort of.’

Sansa takes a deep breath, forcing her voice to be cheerful—it’s not hard, she is happy her little sister is home. ‘I’ll send you the maester. And… and you can use Mother’s rooms—’

‘ _You_ are the Lady of Winterfell.’

Sansa chuckles and rolls her eyes. ‘Bran said you need a warm, cosy place to rest. Not that he used these same words but if you are unwell…’

‘Thank you.’ There is hesitation in her voice, one that Sansa doesn’t know how to read.

She hesitates before following her sister inside the castle. Sansa is puzzled by the unusual yet oddly familiar way Arya sways—her steps used to be smooth, wolf-like. Is it the consequence of a badly healed broken leg? Is it why she’s here?

‘Ciena has prepared leeks and cheese soup for dinner,’ she says in a caring voice, trying to imitate as best as she could how mother sounded when she or one of her siblings got sick. Leek and cheese soup, Arya loved it when they were children, in that faraway time before King Robert rode North. ‘I can have some brought to you if you want.’

‘Thanks, but...’ The hesitation again. ‘I’m so tired that I don’t think I’ll have the strength to get to the Great Hall or eat.’ A mirthless chuckle. ‘Probably I’ll fall asleep as soon as I lay down.’

‘Do you want a bath brought up too?’ Sansa offers. ‘You must be freezing.’

Arya doesn’t reply at once. ‘Just some warm water will suffice, thank you.’

Sansa stops at the foot of the staircase, the worry growing as she watches Arya struggles to climb, her steps too slow—stopping too often to catch her breath—until she cannot bear it any longer. With her long steps, it takes little–too little—to reach her sister, to gently grab her arm. Sansa blinks at the unusual way the cloak falls around Arya—a play of light and shadows of the dancing torch flames. Arya doesn’t push her back this time.

Questions crowds on her lips, fighting with each other to be voiced first, but they only form a jumble of words in her mouth, too hard to swallow. All except four, a command whispered to a passing servant.

‘Send for Maester Wolkan.’

But Maester Wolkan is already there, waiting in front of Mother’s rooms—Bran told him, and Bran is there too. His blank stare lingers on Arya and he says nothing even if he knows everything. And all Sansa can do is to give the maester the privacy he asks, as if he already knows what he would find–part of Sansa is annoyed that Bran told her nothing, but perhaps he doesn’t want to repeat the same blunt he did with Jon—no, not Jon, Aegon. His name is Aegon. And they wait, maybe for a short time, but it feels like the days stretch out into aeons.

_Mother’s mercy, let her be well._

‘How is my sister?’ The question escapes her lips even before Maester Wolkan has closed the door behind him.

The maester bows, uneasy, fidgeting with his chain, looking for the right word. ‘The Lady Arya…’ He chokes on the words; his voice turns into a whisper so low that the wind’s howling almost muffles him. ‘… she is with child.’

_Mother’s mercy_.

So, her eyes didn’t fool her. It’s odd how those words relieve the heaviness in her chest, it’s almost like when she arrived at Castle Black and Jon—no, not Jon, Aegon. His name is Aegon—had taken her into his arms.

A child. Arya with child…

‘How far is she?’ Sansa asks, her words drenched with a worry that saps into the marrow of her bones as the maester’s face darkens.

‘The Mother has been merciful by letting your lady sister reach Winterfell before she got into labour.’

Sansa lets the information sinks. It is almost time, then, it should mean that Arya got pregnant around the Battle of Dawn—both before and after make sense in an odd way. Yet new thoughts impose themselves, the things that need to be done in preparation for a birth.

‘Send someone to Wintertown,’ Sansa says, the demeanour of the Lady of Winterfell fraying on the edges. ‘We need a midwife. And a wet nurse, just in case. And Gilly—I mean, Lady Tarly. She has given birth twice, she could help my sister through it, tell her what to expect—’

‘My lady, I’—Maester Wolkan swallows, his gloom as palpable as breath chilled by the winter cold—‘I don’t expect it to be an easy delivery. The journey took its toll on Lady Arya and she… she is narrow-hipped.’

_Mother’s mercy._

Of all the way she had thought she would lose her sister this is the last that she would have imagined. It had been easy to picture Arya killed—by the White Walkers or the Lannister or dragon fire, but on a childbed? Ridiculous.

For a moment, Sansa fixes at Bran, with the despair of a castaway clinging to wreckage. Part of her craves for the comfort of a word, of a vision, but her brother can only see the Past and the Present, not the Future.

Arya sits on their mother’s bed, her back to the door, her weathered jerkin lose around her body.

‘Arya—’

‘I didn’t want to die without knowing what it was like,’ she cuts Sansa before the question could be asked. ‘And because I thought I would die I didn’t bother with moon tea.’

Sansa closes the door behind Bran and herself, pushing the wheeling chair closer to the fireplace. The light dances on her sister’s gaunt yet swollen face, the jerkin open to reveal a belly rounded as a bread.

‘Then I thought I would die in King’s Landing, and I almost did’—she snorts mirthlessly— 'if not the ride, then certainly all the running and falling and bumping would have taken care of it. And then… then I had a lot going on that it slipped out of my mind.’ Arya chuckles, her eyes lost on the flames and her hand absent-mindedly going on her belly. ‘Stubborn bull-head.’ She lets out a long breath. ‘Anyway, when I realised the mess I was in, it was too late: the amount of tansy and pennyroyal required would have weakened my heart and liver at best, and killed me at worst.’ Arya pulls her hand off her belly and looks away, her face still a mark of hard stone. ‘That left the hook.’

Sansa staggers, stepping back, her eyes wide open and her stomach twisted with nausea, old pain scratching at her insides like rusted blades.

_Not the hook. Please, not the hook_.

In the year she had been married to Ramsay, he had whispered in her ear how he would use it himself if by chance he had the slightest suspicion that she was carrying a girl. once he had even sneered at her horror, claiming that perhaps he should use it on Lady Bolton, just to ascertain that she was indeed carrying a boy. But it never happened, since Maester Wolkan had the kindness to slip moon tea with her meals.

‘Why didn’t you that?’ Bran says in his monotonous voice.

‘Why’—Arya winces, her stone mask broken by a flash of pain. ‘In the Riverland, they directed to someone who could help me, in another village a couple of days away. One night, on my way there’—For the first time since her arrival, Arya looks into their eyes—‘I dreamt of Father, and Mother, and Robb, Rickon and a Volantene woman who was as far as me and…’ She lets out a sob, her voice cracking with memories and unshed tears. ‘When I woke in the morning, Nymeria was there with her pack, and I just knew I could not do it.’ Her lips break in a tentative smile. ‘They took me with them, Nymeria and her pack. They kept me warm, they shared food with me… it took me times to gather my gut and come back home.’  

‘Why Winterfell?’ Bran asks again. ‘Why not Storm’s End?’

Sansa looks at him, frowning. She hates when everybody but her knows what is going on, what the secret is. And since Arya doesn’t reply, Bran urges, in what, in a different time and a different place, would have been a brother trying to reason with his stubborn sister.

‘I saw you in the storeroom. Gendry loves you and you love him, and he asked you to marry him, yet you refused him. And even before that, you told him that you could be his family: why are you not with Gendry?’

_Gendry_.

The rumours re-emerge from Sansa’s memories.

_Seven hells the forge gets so damn hot when whenever she visits him._

_Have you seen how she stares at him when he works?_

_Have you seen how_ he _stared at_ her _when she threw those damned knives?_

_Ol’ Rolf says he saw them in the back store, after the battle._

_Was she “polishing his sword” good? Was he “hammering” her good?_

_Thank the Seven that there’s someone who can put some fire in that fucking cold bitch_. The words the Hound used to stop the wagging tongues.

_Gendry… Gendry…_

It takes a little to Sansa to associate a face to the name. Black hair, blue eyes. A confused lad standing in the middle of the Great Hall, his half-drunken mind elaborating what the Dragon Queen had said.

Gendry, the talented smith from Flea Bottom. Gendry Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End. Arya could have been in Storm’s End right now, happily married to a man who treasured her. Does she realise the luck she had, that still has? How many ladies could boast to be married to a man they love and who loves them

A new pang of jealousy, because Sansa never had a say in the men she had to marry. Lord Tyrion, Ramsey… even Joffrey, even if she had begged her mother to convince her father to say yes to the betrothal, no one had asked her anything—she was just a stupid little bird with her head full of songs and had thought herself in love with a Prince Charming.

‘Do you think I didn’t consider it?’ Arya half cries, half sobs, standing up so abruptly that she wavers—and all Sansa does is to steady her, hold her. ‘Any lady would be happy to have Gendry, to be the Lady of Storm’s End and for a fucking moment, I even considered it! To go back to him, be the family he has always wanted, the odd family we used to be while travelling on the King’s Road so many years ago!’ She sniffs, wiping angry tears with the ball of her hands. There is a little comfort to know that Arya and Lord Baratheon had known each other before Winterfell, that her sister hadn’t acted on a lustful impulse and that there was more feeling in her recklessness than what it would seem at a first glance. ‘But you know what? We wouldn’t be happy. No matter how much we love each other, we would grow bitter and angry and unhappy!’

Arya clings to Sansa, bursting in a sudden cry—just like Ser Brienne after Jaime Lannister left. And she holds her sister, hushing in her ear, stroking her hair like their mother used to do when they were children. Crushed by her sister’s pain—jealous of her sister’s pain.

‘Once I—’

Words fail Arya, her face twisted by pain. Under her hand, Sansa feels her sister’s stomach turns hard as stone—only when it is soft again, her sister is able to speak again, her voice calmer and sombre.

‘Once I met a man who had a daughter. Ghita was her name, and he treasured her more than anything in the world.’ A mirthless smile tugs at the corners of Arya’s lips, a smile that breaks in a heartbeat. ‘He went to every healer in Braavos, spent every penny he had to make her feel better, but nothing worked. Only the Gift was left. I learnt many things that day,’ Arya straightens her back as much as she can, glaring down at Bran. ‘One is: when we love someone, sometimes we have to let them go.  
‘I fucking love Gendry and that’s why I’m letting him go. I’ve grown to fucking love _this_ and I’m letting _it_ go. And I fucking love you as well and I’m leaving _it_ to you because it’s the right thing to do.’

Sansa holds her sister tighter, gently guiding back to the bed. ‘Arya, if Lord Baratheon is the father, then the babe should stay with him, not us. It is his family too.’ _You should marry him_ , but somehow, the words congeal around her vocal cords.

Arya snorts and looks up at her. ‘He’s bull-headed, but give him enough time, and I bet he’d get himself a good pretty lady who pops a babe one after the other. And… and I don’t want _it_ to go through the same as Jon with Mother.’

The words are like a punch in the stomach. Sansa had sided with their mother on that, using polite coldness instead of open hatred, pouring on an innocent soul the hurt and bitterness. There are times when Sansa wonders what the relation between her mother and her half-brother—cousin, he is her cousin—would have been if Lady Cathleen Stark had known the truth. Would have she been caring, a surrogate mother? Or would she have used the information for her own advantage? _Like I did by telling Tyrion_.

‘You are right.’ Bran’s voice is distant. ‘We are the lasts of the Starks. While I will not father a child, and it is likely that what Ramsey did to Sansa has made her barren, _you_ are the only one left to carry on our House. It is why you came to Winterfell. Because the wolves take care of each other.’

The last of the Stark.

The thought tastes like ashes in Sansa’s mouth, just like the thought of her possible barrenness—a possibility she’s too scared to test. And her eyes fall on Arya’s rounded stomach, and she can but wonder about the child she could have brought in the world if she hadn’t been too scared of Ramsay if Maester Wolkan hadn’t had the discretion to slip moon tea with her meals. Sansa would have loved a girl, a little Cat—as many children as the Mother granted her. Yet now and because of Ramsay, that dream as well was shattered.

Could she bring herself to love her niece or nephew as her own? As she should have loved Arya when they were children?

_Yes, I can. And I must_ , Sansa tells herself when Arya bend into two, her rounded stomach hard as stone, the pain cracking through the blank mask of her face.

She helps her sister into their mother’s bed, the same one where they were born, she whispers words of comfort in her ear; she barks at the servant come with a bowl of soup— _call the maester! Call for Lady Tarly! Take Bran out of here!_

The long vigil starts, and Sansa cannot make herself leave her sister’s side, just like a long time ago their mother could not leave Bran’s side. Just like that long ago, the day replaces the night replaces the day. Just like that long ago, there is nothing left to do but pray and wait.

 

* * *

 

The news about Lady Stark giving birth to a bastard son shakes the court. They wonder which one of the king’s cousins is the mother, but soon the rumour settles on the Lady of Winterfell: after all, for what other reason might she have refused to marry in the months that followed the war?

The servants and midwives are asked hushed questions—the babe was probably conceived on the Long Night, or right after. Even a highborn lady like the Lady of Winterfell would have spent what she thought was her last living hours with the man she loved. Even she could have celebrated being alive with the man she loved. The father? He is certainly dead, crushed during the battle, or maybe the Fall of King’s Landing. The father? He was certainly a brave young lord who died before he could wed his beloved lady.

The highborn maidens love this story. Certainly, in given time, troubadours will make songs of it, just like they already do with the other Lady Stark, Arya Nightsbane and Dawnbringer—but that one is not a song fit for a lady.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The more I think about it, and no matter I'd like otherwise, I am convinced that Arya and Gendry would grow unhappy and bitter at each other.


End file.
